The cost of poverty - 20 Oct 2008

My husband recently passed on a lovely little snippet for me to add to a school science magazine that I edit. The figure of $700 billion has been bandied about a lot recently as the amount of the US bailout of banks and financial institutions. The figure is almost unimaginable. So, imagine that you have a job that earns $1 a second, which is $3600 an hour. How long would it take you to earn $700 billion? The answer is more than 2 million years!

A nice, supposedly trivial little puzzle. But far less trivial is the fact that global financial crisis is likely to seriously undermine efforts to reduce poverty in the world. 16 October was World Poverty Day - something that went largely unremarked in most places. But, as an Oxfam representative writing in the Cape Times that day, said, the US government found $700 billion almost overnight to bail out the failing free market financial institutions. This is an almost unimaginably large amount of money. Why can't they find similar amounts of money to eradicate poverty - because this and the amounts that European governments are finding could do so - almost overnight through provision of health care, food and education? The argument is that this is not 'real' money, but simply a reallocation of resources - but that should actually make it easier to spend - particularly in a global and interlinked economy.

Now some 30 000 children die as a result of poverty every day. That is 900 000 a month - do the sums to see the staggering number that this adds up to annually. These children die as a result of malnutrition and illnesses that are largely preventable.

Other numbers that are worth thinking about:
- 1.4 billion people live on less than $1.25 a day.

- One woman dies every minute as a result of pregnancy and childbirth.

- An estimated 40 million people are living with HIV and AIDS.

- The world spends $1.2 trillion on weapons annually but cannot find the $18 billion necessary to help meet existing overseas development assistance commitments.

- For every $1 in aid a developing country receives, over $25 is spent on debt repayment.

You may think that the problems of the world's poor have little to do with you. But all you need to do is look at what mismanagement in the USA and Europe have done to your investments in South Africa and our currency and it should become apparent that the world is an interlinked place. We are none of us immune to the problems of others.